Nancy Drew
Hardy Boys
Bobbsey Twins
Tom Swift
Bunny Brown
The Dana Girls
Honey Bunch
These are just a few of the best loved series many of us enjoyed reading during our childhood. Countless enjoyable hours were spent reading and coming to enjoy a favorite authors works. But who really are the authors of these titles?
When one does a little investigation we find that many of the named authors are merely pen names or pseudonyms used by the Stratemeyer Syndicate.
Edward Stratemeyer was born in 1862 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He began writing stories for magazines in the 1880s. Stratemeyer married Magdalene Van Camp in 1891 and their daughter Harriet was born, in 1892.
Stratemeyer completed several manuscripts left by the late authors Horatio Alger and William T. Adams. With that accomplished he then started his own adventure series for boys, The Rover Boys adventures under the pen name Arthur M. Winfield and published between 1899 and 1926.
As Stratemeyer succesfully captured much of the fiction market for boys' and girls', he started to contract out most of his stories to ghostwriters who filled out general plot outlines he had scripted.
Laura Lee Hope was one such pseudonym. She is attributed to having authored:
The Bobbsey Twins
The Outdoor Girls
The Moving Picture Girls
Bunny Brown
Six Little Bunkers
Make Believe Stories
Blythe Girls
The actual authors taking up the pen name of Laura Lee Hope were Edward Stratemeyer, Harriet (Stratemeyer) Adams, Nancy Axelrad and Howard and Lilian Garis.
No matter who the actual writers were, I have many fond memories reading my favorite books as a child.
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